Inter-Institutional Social Partnerships Between The State And The Church In Romania (With Reference To The Child Protection)

Abstract

Compared to the European countries, the sociologic research related to religiousness and religious affiliation ranks Romania among the most religious countries, this aspect being proved also by the active positioning of the Church in society, especially in the public space. The verification of the phenomenon may be done also through our research theme, which has a content focused on social work, whose result may be used accordingly. There are publications in the field of social work also containing chapters about the Church as an institution, describing the specific activities with social character (either of philanthropy, or of empirical assistance, or even professionalised social work). Nevertheless, most papers mention the Church only in the description of some historical aspects of social work in Romania. Our topic is new because a research similar to ours has not been conducted in Romania yet, in our opinion, as in all bibliographic sources used in the writing of our paper he have found no research approaching such topics. The entire scientific endeavour starts from the formal systematic and non-systematic collaboration already existing between Churches and DGASPCs, but in order to scientifically validate this hypothesis we chose to conduct also a quantitative analysis of the data collected through a questionnaire with closed questions. The main purpose of our paper is the highlighting of the specificity of the interaction between the Church and the social work practice in Romania, through the existing partnership links between the State and the Church.